The Irish Development Education Association (IDEA) is thrilled to invite members to the online launch of our new “Theory of Impact for Global Citizenship Education.” During this session, IDEA will present the model, share insights into the process behind its development, and explore how it will be used to strengthen impact across the sector. It will also introduce a new tool in progress, an interactive data visualisation map designed to showcase our collective impact as a network.
For many years, IDEA and its members have been grappling with the concept of impact in Development Education/Global Citizenship Education (hereinafter ‘GCE’). As GCE practitioners, tracking impact helps IDEA to identify how, where and with whom its work is creating positive change, as well as investigating areas in which its impact could be stronger. Furthermore, IDEA can also benefit from examining the collective impact of GCE carried out by the wide-ranging work of members, and from exploring how these impacts contribute to the major social changes to which the GCE community aspires.
Driven therefore by the need to understand how projects and programmes are collectively “making a difference” in IDEA, it looked at models that could help it visualise and capture GCE “impact networks”. The organisation formulated its vision of impact, and then a theory of how it expects this desired impact to be achieved, to allow it to map activities and collect data to corroborate that theory. This Theory of Impact model is how IDEA hopes to illustrate this complex GCE impact network.
Building on work done by IDEA over many years including building sectoral capacity in using Results Frameworks for GCE, the Quality & Impact working group, engagement with Irish Aid on their Performance Measurement Framework (PMF), and the successful roll-out of a Code of Good Practice for DE/GCE, this Theory of Impact represents the next stage of IDEA’s effort to ‘develop a consistent approach to measuring impact among the sector’.
At this online presentation, IDEA will tell you about the process that led to the creation of this model, how it will be used, and what IDEA hopes it could bring to the sector. IDEA will also touch on a new tool being developed based on the model, which should allow the creation of an interactive data visualisation map of the organisation’s collective impact as a network. Join IDEA as it launches into this exciting new phase of Impact Measurement work.